Editors' Summary: Criminal prosecution is becoming an increasingly important component of the federal government's environmental enforcement strategy. The recent issuance of the federal Sentencing Guidelines has dramatically increased the role of criminal enforcement in environmental law. The guidelines require judges to impose specific sentences within certain ranges for various categories of environment crimes. Defendants are unlikely to escape with probation, as was often the case in preguideline prosecutions. This Article analyzes the impacts and mechanics of the guidelines.

In an 8-to-1 decision authored by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit's decision that the South Florida Water Management District's (District's) operation of a pumping station required a national pollutant discharge elimination system (NPDES) permit because pollutants transferred from a canal to a water conservation area would not have occurred but for the operation of the pump.

One of the most fundamental tenets of toxicology is that "the dose determines the poison." This simple phrase provides the basis for the belief that all agents—chemicals and physical phenomena that are capable of producing some effect—have the potential to cause toxicity. Whether toxicity actually occurs is principally a matter of dose: the greater the exposure to a given agent, the more pronounced or severe the response of a cell or organism.

In recent years, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has expanded its programs to assist governments around the world in building their capacity to protect the environment. This effort serves policies embodied in a variety of treaties, appropriations, and other legislative and executive decisions. A small but important part of this work is the effort to help other countries develop an effective legal framework for environmental protection.

In the fall of 1993, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in its opinion in In re Bell Petroleum Services, Inc., articulated its standard for determining joint and several liability under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980 (CERCLA). In so doing, it joined the ranks of four other circuit courts that have spoken on this issue.

One of the most prominent issues in the Congressional debate over reauthorization of the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA or Superfund) has been how to reduce "transaction costs" while at the same time fairly and expeditiously resolving liability disputes. This Dialogue asks: Would the allocation procedures proposed in last year's Superfund reauthorization bills meet those sometimes conflicting goals?

On February 4, 1994, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit vacated the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA's) April 1992 lender liability rule, which delineated the scope of the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act's (CERCLA's) secured creditor exemption. The court held in Kelley v. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that the regulation could not stand as a substantive or legislative rule because Congress, through CERCLA, gave courts and not EPA the authority to interpret questions of liability.

Earlier this year in KFC Western, Inc. v. Meghrig, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that private parties may obtain restitution of the costs of cleaning up contaminated property under §7002(a)(1)(B) of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA). The Ninth Circuit's ruling in KFC Western opened the way for private parties to use the RCRA citizen suit provision to recover their costs of investigating, studying, and cleaning up contaminated property from responsible parties.

Although the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) has been widely acclaimed as an instrument of decisionmaking reform, doubts have periodically been expressed regarding its effectiveness.¹ No legislation, however well intentioned or successful, should be exempt from periodic reexamination. Some criticisms of NEPA have been well-founded—prompting improvements in its implementation—but other criticisms have faulted the Act itself, claiming it to be counter-productive in relation to the purposes for which it was enacted.

An easement is a limited right, granted by the owner of real property, to use all or part of his property for specific purposes. A traditional legal use of an easement, for example, has been for owner A, on whose property a stream flows, to allow neighbor B to cross A's property in order to take water from A's stream.